A spacecraft’s-eye view over the landscapes of Mars has simply given us a first-of-its-kind glimpse of the enormous, historic edifice often called Arsia Mons.

The NASA satellite tv for pc Odyssey captured the big equatorial volcano as its tip peeked above the morning clouds of water ice – a typical function presently of the Martian 12 months, when the crimson planet is at its furthest level from the Solar on its barely elliptical orbit.

Arsia Mons belongs to a volcanic complicated often called the Tharsis Montes; three protect volcanoes very shut collectively within the Tharsis area of Mars. Arsia Mons is the tallest of the three, standing at a towering top of almost 20 kilometers (12 miles).

That is dramatically greater than any mountain on Earth, the place the tallest peak above sea stage (Mount Everest) stands 8.85 kilometers excessive and the tallest mountain, Mauna Kea, rises 9 kilometers above the ocean ground. It additionally has round 30 occasions extra quantity than Earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa – and it isn’t even the greatest volcano on Mars.

Its exercise is assumed to have lasted billions of years, peaking round 150 million years in the past.

Odyssey often has its cameras pointed down towards the floor of Mars. To acquire the brand new panorama, it needed to rotate 90 levels in order that its digicam pointed on the horizon. This angle is well worth the effort: it permits scientists to make out layers and clouds within the skinny Martian sky to raised perceive its atmospheric dynamics and processes.

Clouds kind round Arsia Mons when increasing air rises up the slopes of the mountain, quickly cooling, permitting ice crystals to kind. At Mars’s present place in its journey across the Solar, a belt of clouds types across the equator often called the aphelion cloud belt.

Curiosity captured this phenomenon from the floor a number of years in the past; the brand new Odyssey panorama offers us a spectacular view from above.

“We picked Arsia Mons hoping we’d see the summit poke above the early morning clouds,” says aerospace engineer Jonathon Hill of Arizona State College. “And it did not disappoint.”